Updating computers to Windows 7 64bit with a new graphics card and need to know Adobe's recommended graphic cards for Photoshop CS5. Is there any information regarding this. They have them listed for Photoshop CS4. I would like to be like a good carpenter and measure twice and only cut once.

The price of the GTX 285 skyrocketed in the past months since nvidia basically stopped making anything from GTX 260 and up so there's absolutely no reason to buy one of those cards. If all you'll use is Photoshop then any ~100$ card will do (even cheaper cards will do just fine if you can't spare the money).

Also, no point in worrying about OpenGL 2.0 support as you won't find any PCI-e cards that don't support it (or Shader Model 3.0 for that matter)

Nvidia stopped the production of the GTX 260, 275 and 285 which lead to huge price hikes to those cards so now a GTX 285 costs more than a Radeon 5850 even though it's slower. There is absolutely no (sane) reason to buy a GTX 285 at the current prices, especially not for Photoshop where you won't notice the difference between a 50$ and a 500$ video card.

NVIDIA don't (usually) make graphics cards. They make graphics controllers, and provide reference designs for graphics cards. Stopping production of a particular card is not in their capacity to choose. You're talking nonsense.

Where I am (in New Zealand), the price of a GTX 285 has hardly moved in the past year.

Nitpicking eh? i can do that: nvidia doesn't make graphics controllers, they don't make anything at all as they're a fabless company so they put TSMC to make their chips and then hand off the assembly of the reference designs to Foxconn or whoever.

The fact that nvidia stopped the production of their high end GPU's a while back isn't official but they might as well have as after the Radeon 5xxx series showed up the supply of high-end stuff from nvidia started to disappear and a lot of nvidia board partners discontinued their GTX series cards. Check for yourself, just google GTX 285 eol. You can also check the prices from NewEgg, the GTX 285 starts from 350$ while being slower than a 5850 that starts from 310$. When Ati introduced their 5xxx series the normal response for nvidia would have been to lower their prices but that hasn't happened, instead the supply went down so the prices started to go up, compare the prices of today to those from around september 2009 and you'll see (the prices should have dropped by ~100$ for the 285 to compete with the 5850)

Yes, nitpicking, not worth it, quite right. And perhaps you're right and the production of G200 series chips has stopped or will soon stop. But to say that the price of GTX 285 has skyrocketed, when what you seem to mean is that the prices have stayed about the same in circumstances where you would have expected them to fall, is, well, not what you meant to say. I'd still buy the GTX 285 today, and think it's still good value. (In preference to a GTX 470 or 480.) I stick with NVIDIA only because I use software that does GPGPU computing via CUDA. I expect you're right to steer towards ATI instead for best current value.

Well,that's interesting! The Nvidea GtX 285 is one of the video cards that is approved for premiere cs5 running with the mercury playback engine. A lot of folks are gonna be bewildered by this bit of news.

nvidia doesn't make graphics controllers, they don't make anything at all as they're a fabless company so they put TSMC to make their chips and then hand off the assembly of the reference designs to Foxconn or whoever.

I'm runing WIndows 7- 64 bit and have an ATI 4850 graphics card with CS5 trial and latest updates to both ATI driver and CS5. CS5 still says there is a GPU problem and when I look in "preferences/Performance", there is NO video card detected. Every time I re-enable the GPU, CS5 turns it back off. Anybody have any hints? The ATI 4000 series is a supported GPU.

I'm runing WIndows 7- 64 bit and have an ATI 4850 graphics card with CS5 trial and latest updates to both ATI driver and CS5. CS5 still says there is a GPU problem and when I look in "preferences/Performance", there is NO video card detected. Every time I re-enable the GPU, CS5 turns it back off. Anybody have any hints? The ATI 4000 series is a supported GPU.

The 32 bit Catalyst 10.7 drivers do that to me too at the moment (I have an ATI Radeon HD 4670 card) - OpenGL cannot be enabled in Photoshop 32 bit (it reports the somewhat bogus error message "No GPU Options Available in Photoshop Standard"). Photoshop 64 bit loves the 64 bit drivers from the very same set, though.

Clearly the ATI developers have something wrong in the latest 32 bit drivers.

This has been a problem since 10.5 and I have reported the problem to ATI. I suggest you do so as well. Perhaps if enough people complain they'll start testing their new driver releases with Photoshop CS5, which I don't think they're doing now.

For what it's worth, I am discovering quirks in the OpenGL implementations of the various drivers from the various video card makers myself as I do my own OpenGL software development. The realm of OpenGL and graphics drivers is highly complex, evolving rapidly, and more oriented to gamers than serious users with, e.g., Photoshop.

If you're interested, I posted some info in this thread about how to override Photoshop's default startup OpenGL checking, which can allow you for test purposesto enable Photoshop's OpenGL features despite whatever's failing:

Thanks for the info. Note that I AM using the 64-bit drivers and CS5 doesn't even SEE my video card. I don't know of any other apps that test for the card,so I can't really say if THIS PARTICULAR failure is a driver problem or if CS5 just doesn't use the proper recognition-trigger for the card. My error message says, "Photoshop has encountered a problem withthe display driver and has temporaril;y disabled GPU parameters." There's more, but not relevant.

I have completely uninstalled ALL ATI programs and drivers and have run DriverSweeper in Safe mode, then re-installed CCC with all options except the game demo. Still no help

Thanks for the info. I have completely uninstalled ALL ATI programs and drivers and have run DriverSweeper in Safe mode, then re-installed CCC with all options except the game demo. Still no help

CS5 doesn't even SEE my video card (in Preferences/Performance). I don't know of any other apps that test for the card,so I can't really say if THIS PARTICULAR failure is a driver problem or if CS5 just doesn't use the proper recognition-trigger for the card. My error message says, "Photoshop has encountered a problem with the display driver and has temporarily disabled GPU parameters." There's more, but not relevant.

I don't think you have this wrong but just to clarify:Photoshop 32 bit uses the 32 bit drivers and Photoshop 64 bit uses the 64 bit drivers - all on the same x64 system.

Given that you're seeing a crash, it sounds like what you're seeing is a more serious bug than what I'm seeing. You might want to try an older driver set, possibly prior to 10.6, which is when (I think) ATI claimed to first support the OpenGL 3.3 standard. These things seem to be in a constant state of flux.

What can be confusing is that when it chooses to not allow the use of OpenGL, it will display this rather cryptic message, which makes you think it doesn't recognize your card at all:

Yes, that's what I see on the Performance tab. I have reported it as a problemm to Diamond MM who sold me the ATI card. I guess they take the ATI engine and customize, box and sell it, so I can't report it DIRECTLY to ATI, because they only support what THEY sell (what a cop-out).

BUT, one would think ADOBE would supply some clout and make a phone call to ATI to get it straight. Since I haven't yet bought CS5 (still using the demo), I can't beat on Adobe to do that (yet). Still evaluating,but probably will buy it to move up from Elements.

Go to Start, computer, right click on computer and choose properties. Click on Device Manager, click on View then click on Show Hidden Devices. Click on the White arrow where it reads Display Adapters. There should only be one card listed (if you have dual GPU's then there will be two). If there is more then one card listed and it is a lighter shade of gray then delete that. Sometimes, when a different card is installed, Windows will still show the card listed but it is hidden from view. Clicking on Show Hidden Devices will show the removed cards in light gray. Deleting them will stop Windows and other software from searching for them. These grayed out devices have caused problems in the past with system software.

I just installed CS5 yesterday. Went to preference/performance and my ATI HD4670 shows up. Running Vista 64, i7 processor 920@ 2.67ghz with 6gb of DDR3 Ram. Have two 1TB drives installed. Only time slow is when using the pixel bender plugin with large files. I also reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled Vista 64 to clean out any old junk floating around in there just in case. Running CS5 in 64bit.

After deleting and re-installing the drivers, there was no immediate change, but after TWO more re-boots (for other reasons), the GPU appeared and has been there ever since. I posted a note on the ATI website as well and informed them that it's fixed.

I develop OpenGL applications myself. I recently ran a big beta test, and I had virtually no problems with ATI-equipped systems, some problems with nVidia-equipped systems, and a whole bunch of serious problems with systems with Intel GPUs, some of which actually required re-architecting my software. Just one of many major issues is that while the OpenGL standards support the ability to pass a rendering context between threads, the actuality of Intel's driver implementation is that if you do this you will utterly CRASH the application. ATI and nVidia drivers deal with it just fine.

Intel's poor OpenGL implementations literally cost me several months delay in releasing my OpenGL products. At one point I was wondering whether to even allow my users to enable OpenGL acceleration on an Intel GPU at all, though I ultimately did find sufficient workarounds to their problems to make it work.

I don't believe any of the systems my beta testers used were specifically Sandy Bridge-equipped, but since an OpenGL implementation is HUGELY complex, it's a fair assumption that they're using at least some of the same architecture for implementing the drivers as they have used for their past GPUs. It would be practically impossible to build an OpenGL implementation from the ground up in less than several years. It's that enormously complex.

I have great respect for Intel for their processor development, and Intel's latest drivers do seem to be improving, but it appears they have still a long way to go in tidying up their implementation of OpenGL.

So, regarding how well Photoshop is going to work with an Intel GPU... I can only guess that Adobe has already had to work around many of the problems I saw, but there are advanced operations that I could never get to work on Intel-based systems, and like Adobe, I had to implement several OpenGL "modes" to compensate. So you might find that Photoshop will only run in Basic OpenGL mode, if it enables OpenGL at all, with an Intel GPU. And it might just be less stable over long-term use.

I certainly hope that Intel adds some discipline to their OpenGL driver software development process and comes up to to speed soon. More competition is certainly better for us. They're just not there yet.

My confidence is high that each new ATI driver release will work, though they have occasionally caused unexpected problems (their recent 11.3 and 11.4 releases broke OpenGL in Photoshop). It's less high that nVidia will release good drivers every time, especially with video cards that are no longer current. At this point I simply have even less confidence in Intel, even with their latest GPUs. They'll need to prove themselves.

Thanks for the excellent description of the problems. It would be great if you could make this information known to publishers of PC & photo-related media, such as PC World, Maximum PC, and Popular Photography. All of these have had articles related to Photoshop and/or Sandy Bridge, many of which (but not all) have given the impression that we don't really need graphics cards. This might be true for general users, but not for advanced amateurs and pro's who do serious graphics. Your discussion might help clarify the situation for their readers.